Sam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
l33tminion) wrote2014-01-07 02:20 am
l33tminion) wrote2014-01-07 02:20 am
Entry tags:
Up Late on a Cold Night
It seems that my work follows a cycle:
1. I start picking at some complicated issue, solving related problems as I find them.
2. I eventually get something to work, but by that point the fix is a blob of unrelated things.
3. I do some performance testing and find that makes things slower for reasons that are now impossible to determine.
4. Now that I understand the issue better, I can pick off simple sub-problems and solve them individually, testing as I go along, until only the really complicated issue that I still don't understand is left.
5. Repeat.
Still, today was the most productive day I've had at work for a while. I stayed in the flow of things for a long time and just kept chipping away at my work.
(I completed my first open-source contribution as a Googler, too. Well, that was in a while ago, actually, but I just found out that it had been committed today.)
I spent quite a bit of time chipping at my work last weekend, too. Normally I try to avoid work when I'm not on, but being in the middle of a project and having such a short week after getting back from break made me more tempted than usual to log in and prod my testing along.
It wasn't all work, though. Cooking this weekend was very enjoyable. I roasted beets and parsnips from last weeks vegetable box, and prepared a butterflied leg of lamb that had been sitting in our freezer for an alarming number of months (quite possibly more than a year). I used a recipe from the Salt cookbook for Indian-spiced leg of lamb cooked in a salt crust. Was an interesting method of cooking, and a great success (a great dinner and quite a few meals worth of delicious leftovers sandwiches). The technique starts with a standard spice rub, then you wrap the whole thing in an extremely salty dough (almost as much coarse sea salt as flour) before roasting. Once it's ready, you break it open and discard the crust. This particular recipe put curry leaves in the crust. I hadn't cooked with those before, they have a beautiful aroma. I definitely want to experiment more with this technique. There seem to be several variations, some recipes use a salt-and-egg-whites crust instead of salt-and-flour.
There was a warm breeze this morning, the last respite before the cold-snap. This evening wasn't as bad as I'd feared (it stayed fairly dry, so there's not too much ice). But tomorrow is going to be quite cold.
Stay warm, everyone!
1. I start picking at some complicated issue, solving related problems as I find them.
2. I eventually get something to work, but by that point the fix is a blob of unrelated things.
3. I do some performance testing and find that makes things slower for reasons that are now impossible to determine.
4. Now that I understand the issue better, I can pick off simple sub-problems and solve them individually, testing as I go along, until only the really complicated issue that I still don't understand is left.
5. Repeat.
Still, today was the most productive day I've had at work for a while. I stayed in the flow of things for a long time and just kept chipping away at my work.
(I completed my first open-source contribution as a Googler, too. Well, that was in a while ago, actually, but I just found out that it had been committed today.)
I spent quite a bit of time chipping at my work last weekend, too. Normally I try to avoid work when I'm not on, but being in the middle of a project and having such a short week after getting back from break made me more tempted than usual to log in and prod my testing along.
It wasn't all work, though. Cooking this weekend was very enjoyable. I roasted beets and parsnips from last weeks vegetable box, and prepared a butterflied leg of lamb that had been sitting in our freezer for an alarming number of months (quite possibly more than a year). I used a recipe from the Salt cookbook for Indian-spiced leg of lamb cooked in a salt crust. Was an interesting method of cooking, and a great success (a great dinner and quite a few meals worth of delicious leftovers sandwiches). The technique starts with a standard spice rub, then you wrap the whole thing in an extremely salty dough (almost as much coarse sea salt as flour) before roasting. Once it's ready, you break it open and discard the crust. This particular recipe put curry leaves in the crust. I hadn't cooked with those before, they have a beautiful aroma. I definitely want to experiment more with this technique. There seem to be several variations, some recipes use a salt-and-egg-whites crust instead of salt-and-flour.
There was a warm breeze this morning, the last respite before the cold-snap. This evening wasn't as bad as I'd feared (it stayed fairly dry, so there's not too much ice). But tomorrow is going to be quite cold.
Stay warm, everyone!